But more importantly, there's the not-so-small matter of his power plays with the State Dept. that ensured that the people who knew the most about Iraq would not be involved in stabilizing the country:

The ideological intrigue reached into the upper levels of the Bush administration. Rumsfeld ordered General Garner to drop a State Department official named Thomas Warrick from his reconstruction team. Garner protested, his aides recall; he needed Warrick, who had been the author of a $5 million, yearlong study called �The Future of Iraq.� Rumsfeld�s reply, as relayed by Garner to his aides, was: �I�m sorry, but I just got off a phone call from a level that is sufficiently high that I can�t argue with him.� Sources tell NEWSWEEK that Rumsfeld was taking his orders from Vice President Cheney.

Assumption one: Saddam Hussein is a bad, bad man.
Assumption two: We don't like him.
Assumption three: We don't want him to develop WMDs that he could use on US (we didn't use to care that he used them on his own people in 1988).

Hypothesis one: As we had done for the past 12 years, through strategic strikes, we could have continued to foil Hussein's attempts to create or obtain WMDs.
Hypothesis two: Had opted for such a course, we would now have considerable more money, resources, and troops to apply to the ongoing search for Osama Bin Laden (the acknowledged mastermind of 9/11) and the restabilization of Afghanistan (remember that country? the one nobody reports on any more that's still full of evil-doers and chaos?)
Hypothesis three: Had we followed this course,
a) members of our troops would not be dying daily in Iraq,
b) insurrectionary forces would still be aiming at Hussein, not the U.S. military,
c) and the staggering cost of maintaining a military presence in Iraq, and rebuilding it would not fall squarely upon the shoulders of U.S. taxpayers already struggling against the shock and awe of record deficits.
Hypothesis four: The U.S. would currently enjoy far greater world esteem and find more cooperation internationally for endeavors like pursuing bin Laden and dealing with North Korea.
Hypothesis five: A dangerous "diplomatic" policy, that of pre-emptive strikes against suspected immediate threats to a nation (not "potential," suspected; it's now clear that Iraq had miserably little potential to threaten U.S. shores), would not now be justification for war to any ol' paranoid or embattled country around the globe, like say, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Iran, or Syria.